The Street or Me: A New York Story

Why Bother

It was rush hour and a dismal February night in Midtown Manhattan. I was on my way home from a temp secretarial job and climbed the subway stairs at the Columbus Circle station. As I neared the top, I heard raised voices and a commotion. The exit was part of the Hearst Building, home to Cosmopolitan magazine. Beautiful people were leaving for the day but no one stopped as the confrontation escalated. Instead, they snapped opened umbrellas and braced against the pelting winter rain about to envelop them on the sidewalk.

I lingered to watch two burly security guards shove a belligerent, drunk, homeless woman away from the building's revolving doors. As she struggled against their force, she lost her footing on the wet terrazzo and fell into the guards. Instinctively, their arms reached out to stop the fall before they quickly dropped to their sides. To touch this wretched woman appeared intolerable.

She wobbled for secure footing, only to fall backward and land on the ground with a thud. Her filthy, beige woolen coat and layered clothing underneath softened the fall since she didn't yell in pain. Instead, she spun around and kicked at the men as she lay on her back. Her arms flailed over her head to remind me of a child making a snow angel.

''You motherfuckin' cocksuckers,'' she screamed, as the guards jumped back.

Get the fuck out of here, scumbag. And don't come back, one guard yelled as he placed his heavy boot on her ankle to stop her kicks. But she continued to bang his other leg with her free foot. He then looked at his fellow guard and motioned for them to return to the building's entrance.

I was captivated by this woman as the scene unfolded. She was white, approximately five-feet, three-inches tall and thin under her layered clothing. Her long, unkempt, light-brown hair had blond highlights and a natural wave. I guessed her to be mid-thirties, possibly younger. It was hard to tell. Something about her was different from the countless homeless people who littered the city. Her filth obscured a sense of style. She was pretty with a husky voice that carried a foreign accent, one I couldn't differentiate. But it was her translucent blue eyes that transfixed me despite being bloodshot and enlarged with anger. In addition to a large dose of curiosity about her, my feelings mixed disgust with fear of the homeless.

When the guards left, two black men who appeared homeless came out of the shadows. A pungent stench from the trio filled the area, powerful enough for some passersby to gag and cover their nose and mouth. The men bent over to pick up the sobbing woman in the fetal position, one side of her swollen face pressed against the cold pavement. She stopped crying when she recognized them. She swayed when righted and screamed another obscenity into the air. She then hurled the small paper bag she held in her hand. It hit the building's plate-glass doors, bounced off and hit the ground. The bottle inside shattered, releasing a peppermint scent.

''What you do that for, Michelle?'' asked one man. ''We gotta get out of here and you're causing trouble again. Damn. We need that schnapps for tonight.''

Not answering, she broke into a wide grin that revealed broken teeth. She then linked her arms into the offered elbows of the two men. They guided her away from the confrontation into the dark and wet night. I continued to watch, fascinated by the event, and until the trio hobbled up crowded Eighth Avenue resembling the Wizard of Oz characters on the Yellow Brick Road. A refreshing peppermint aroma overtook their absence, as the guards returned to the area with large, stringy mops. With a few whisks and their moans of disgust, the ugly episode and its aftermath vanished.

I'd been riveted by the outburst and had pressed myself against the building to watch, far enough away to feel safe. When it ended as quickly as it began, I opened my umbrella and walked into the rainy night headed toward my nearby apartment building, which was a block away in the sketchy Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. My teenage son, Derek Albanese, was waiting for me to cook dinner. But my thoughts were with Michelle. How did she get like that?

It was early 1989 when I first noticed Michelle in my neighborhood. A rogue atmosphere permeated the Hell's Kitchen streets located roughly from W. 34th Street up to West 57th Street and from Eighth Avenue to the Hudson River. In the following decades, the neighborhood would become trendy, expensive and gentrified by big-chain stores with a bank on most corners. People would refer to it as Clinton or the West Fifties. But when I moved there, Hell's Kitchen was one tough area where The Westies ruled until the end of the late 1980s. They were two generations of Irish gangsters known for murder, theft, arson, extortion and gambling, among assorted vices.

I wasn't a native New Yorker but did own a 400-square-foot studio there for several years. I adored my new home that overlooked a courtyard, a first-time major financial investment for me after my divorce. It had gleaming hardwood floors, sun streaming in and a fireplace that captured my heart. But I was frightened to walk one block over to Ninth Avenue, often littered with discarded syringes used by drug addicts. I was unaccustomed to people who weren't like me and lived in the turn-of-the-century, walk-up buildings.  I avoided them. An entrance to Central Park was two blocks away in the opposite direction so I'd head there to see greenery or take a stroll.

When I signed the loan document for my $80,000 studio, I gambled Hell's Kitchen's rough image would improve. What I didn't know at closing when the keys were slid across the table was Black Monday would occur two years later. The global stock market crash decimated the New York real estate market. My studio's value dropped to $25,000, enslaving me to a high mortgage, no resale and a coop apartment building almost in bankruptcy.

My hometown was Providence, Rhode Island, and where I divorced my high-school-sweetheart husband. For the next five years, I lived a dismal and meager life as a single mother to our four teenage children. Eventually, I knew to improve the quality of my life and that of my children's, I had to leave the economically depressed state and start over. My ex-husband happily moved back into the fully furnished house when I sold him my share for a pittance. Several years later, three children remained with him but the youngest, Derek, unexpectedly moved into my cramped New York studio at age 16, failing all grades.

One point during the day of Derek's arrival in New York, I was in tears wondering how I'd handle this unforeseen situation. Surely, my love for him was endless but most people wouldn't undertake a failing teenager under my cramped conditions. I had two closets for clothing, already filled, and a narrow utility closet. My glass-topped dining table was eighteen-inches deep and five-feet long and placed along a wall outside the kitchen, which wasn't eat-in. My bed was a queen-size sofabed, which I'd open nightly. Derek's bed would be a single-size futon chair he'd open into a bed. I purchased a Japanese soshi folding screen to provide a semblance of privacy.

My writing area was a desk and a tall file cabinet against the wall near the apartment's two adjoining windows that overlooked a tree-lined courtyard and where birds chirped. I adored the floor-to-ceiling, aged-brick fireplace that covered half a wall. But with Derek about to live with me in the studio, I could have used that wall for furniture placement, not a fireplace.

As I waited for his arrival in the Port Authority Bus Station a few days before he'd enroll in a new school, I sat on a deserted bench and watched the homeless arrive to bed down in the terminal's dank underground. Derek had never seen people like that. How would he handle New York at his tender age, coming from a small New England city, no father or siblings present and living in a studio with his financially challenged mother? Was I nuts?

''Hi Mom,'' Derek said, as he walked toward me with a big smile. He carried two, green, plastic garbage bags, one slung over each shoulder, which contained his clothes and his favorite pillow. I sensed his fear when he saw the homeless in the station and about the venture he'd signed on for with me. I splurged and took us home in a cab.

''This is home, Derek,'' I said, turning the key in the apartment door and opened it wide.

It was impossible for two people to enter the narrow hallway together. Derek walked in before me with a stride, stopped and stared at the one room. He said nothing as I pointed out his one closet and the few drawers I'd emptied for his belongings. That afternoon we went shopping for new school clothes, charging even more to my credit card with its overdue minimum payment.

But it was in the darkness of our first night together and what he said that gave me hope we might make it. He talked about changing his life to make a success of himself. I said I'd help him do it, adding changing one's life dramatically would be one of the most painful decisions he'd face. But he could do it. He would do it. And I'd show him how. What he didn't know or see in the darkness of our room was me curled in a fetal position on my sofabed, holding back sobs and terrified how I'd raise him in New York without child support.

I enrolled him in St. Agnes Boys High School, a small private Catholic high school run by the Marist Brothers and, at that time, located in the East 40's off Lexington Avenue. Derek would be given a chance to succeed but he'd repeat the tenth grade. For the first day of school, I helped him knot his tie. We walked the 20 blocks to the five-story, walk-up school crammed between restaurants and shops. It was a far cry from the middle-class, benign Providence neighborhood with which Derek was familiar.

Whizzing past along our walk were businesspeople with briefcases and joggers on their way to Central Park. Jackhammers tore up sidewalks and cranes hoisted huge machinery above our heads. Two cab drivers cursed at each other. At the outer fringes of Times Square, emaciated prostitutes wearing fishnet stockings leaned against buildings and stared at Derek as we passed.

When we reached his new school, Derek looked petrified climbing the front steps. When he opened the door, I saw a large sign above the main staircase. The Street Stops Here greeted my son about to be a white minority, knowing no one except Brother Tom who granted him a second chance. I shook my head, thinking he'd never make it.

Since I despised the restrictive corporate world and was hampered by an eclectic resume that was more entertaining than job landing, I signed up for temp secretarial work. I'd also be hired from time to time for miniscule public relations jobs or to organize special events. The freedom allowed me to accept all-expense-paid trips to write freelance travel articles for national newspapers. That's where I excelled, but it wasn't a money-maker. My love life was eclectic since I avoided commitment. Eventually, the right man would come along. In other words, to get by in New York, I winged it.

I had sealed my past with no home in Rhode Island. And I'd pissed off a few people along the way. Curiously, I was homeless, too, when I arrived in New York knowing I had to get anchored. But foremost, I had to be a strong example to my children to never give up, to expand their horizons and to never accept how others thought they should live their lives. Tall order, but I'd get it done.

Whenever Derek needed privacy in our apartment, I'd walk our neighborhood and see the same homeless people. They seemed to have territorial panhandling rights at certain banks and corners. The huddled and faceless lumps of humanity were bonded tribal members clustered under cardboard boxes, asleep in bank lobbies at night and hovered in doorways. If Michelle was one of them, I never noticed.

I was repulsed by their ever-growing numbers throughout the city, but my charitable conscience only played out with clothing donations to The Salvation Army. The city's social service agencies, hospitals or drop-in